“Shoot ‘em in the head, shoot ‘em in the head, KILL! KILL KILL KILL WE WILL!”

Why did this Chinese-American immigrant enlist in the US Army?

April 17, 2025

These are excerpts from a book I am writing. I would love your feedback, it’s fun to write and share all this in real time and certainly helps to motivate me to keep writing daily.

Turns out I don’t know the first thing about writing a book. Where do I even begin? How do I format it? Is it appropriate to just write a stream of consciousness or should I be more deliberate?

Eh, fuck it(the same thing I said when I read a book about the Appalachian Trail and decided to go hike the whole thing 45 days later). I’m going to write this like a journal. Give you my day to day updates and thoughts as the US slides further into fascism. I think there is power and poignancy to this kind of testament. Maybe someone reading this in the future when tyranny again raises its head can read my words and take heed, take warning, and stop the madness in their own world.

Enlisting in the US Army

“Shoot ‘em in the head, shoot ‘em in the head, KILL! KILL KILL KILL WE WILL!” This disturbing mantra was a regular cadence that was called during my time at Sand Hill. The training place for all US Army infantrymen located inside Ft. Moore, GA(renamed from Ft. Benning in 2023 due to Benning being a confederate general. It was re-renamed to Ft. Benning in 2025 under trump).

Looking at this photo makes me feel old.

I joined in 2009. It’s hard to say exactly why I joined. I remember that time in my life being tumultuous. I was in my junior year studying Accounting at the University of Missouri(yeah yeah an Asian studying to be an accountant). I was a resident advisor in the dorm at the time. I remember being really dissatisfied with my life, being isolated socially, and being severely depressed.

The feeling of dissatisfaction with my life and not having a clear sense of purpose was a large motivating factor in joining. At the time I was also really into conspiracy theories having grown up with 4chan and Bodybuilding.com forums and read all the 9/11 conspiracies. WTC 7, jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, FEMA death camps, project Jade Helm, etc. I remember being in a car on our way to the Midwest Asian American Association annual meeting and telling my friends how we all needed to prepare for the government to take our guns and send us to Guantanamo bay. Silly, looking back. I hope I can look back to this present time now and see that again I was overreacting.

I think what lies underneath all of this conspiracy was my trauma from China. I was and still am traumatized at my core from experiencing the fear of a repressive authoritarian government and living in a country that used its military to murder its own citizens for political dissent. A country that jailed my father for speaking out and standing up for freedom and human rights.

Mentally I was at a low. Depressed and without purpose. Feeling like the government was going to oppress us all. And I needed to take action. I called up recruiters.

My first call was to an Air National Guard recruiter in Whiteman Air Force Base. They are home to all the B2 stealth bombers. The recruiter told me, “well, you need to score pretty high on the ASVAB and we don’t have that many slots” and then made an excuse to get off the phone without even getting my information.

Cool cool cool the Air Force obviously doesn’t want me. Next I called up an Army recruiter that had been recommended to me by my friend “Sarge.” Hilarious looking back on it. This was a 17 year old kid who I worked with as a lifeguard at the city pool in Bolivar, Missouri on my summers off from college. We all called him “Sarge” because the Army was his entire personality. He was so into the military that he got permission from his parents to enlist at 17. He eventually went on to be a sniper and deployed to Afghanistan and had crazy stories about getting shot at and having RPGs detonate next to him.

The Army recruiter was on it. He had me at MEPS taking my ASVAB and signing my contract two weeks later. I remember coming out of the test room and showing my results to my recruiter. He grabbed the printout and sprinted to the front desk and quite alarmed me by shoving my score under the nose of the mountain of muscle sitting there. It didn’t seem wise to me to make any sudden movements much less bumrush the surly black Marine working the front desk. But my recruiter managed to keep life and limb as he exclaimed, “look at his score! This is the highest score I’ve ever seen!”

I scored a 98 on my ASVAB. One point shy of the highest score possible. At the time the Army was desperately hurting for recruits. “The Surge” happened in 2008 and many troops were put under “stop-loss”, forcing them to stay in the military and prolonging their deployments because of our acute troop shortages. You only needed a 35 ASVAB score at the time to join the infantry. There have been many times in the Army when I was laying in a cold, wet hole in the ground, or being woken up at 3am to pull fireguard even though we never once had an actual fire to guard, when I thought “damn I wish I’d tried harder to get into the Air Force.”

If you’re reading this and thinking about joining the military, go join the Air Force.

After doing an awkward duck walk across the floor and having an ancient doctor(seriously he had to be over 90) look me over while I stood in a line next to other nervous, naked recruits, I was cleared to enlist. I was seated in a cold office room with six other recruits when the same surly mountain of muscle came in and told us that we’d better confess if we’d lied on our enlistment paperwork. Speak up now or we’d face court martial and jail later! I broke out in a cold sweat. I hadn’t disclosed that I’d taken steroids the year before. Would they find out? Would I be sent to prison? No one said a word.

Next the mountain dragged a US flag sitting on a heavy podium into the room and told us to stand up and raise our right hands. He projected the oath of enlistment up on the whiteboard and we all recited as one, “I, ‘chorus of random names’, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

I remember feeling a swell of pride at taking what was to me at the age of 21 the most difficult and, scary, and important decision I’d ever made. It’s downright terrifying to enlist into the infantry when the country is in two wars.

Another memory that sticks out to me is that the other people enlisting with me, none of them were white. They were black and hispanic. This theme held true throughout my service. Minorities make up a disproportionate percent of our military. So these recent DEI purges are absurd and will absolutely hurt recruiting and thus our military readiness and national defense.

I didn’t consult my adopted mother or Chinese mother about my decision to enlist. I didn’t tell anyone about my decision until I’d already signed the paperwork and swore in. I think this is illustrative of my lack of connection to family. I have felt essentially that I’m on my own since the age of eight.

I was a freshman in high school on September 11th. I watched live on TV in history class as the second tower fell. My history teacher would be deployed to Iraq as part of his National Guard aviation unit a few years later. I watched the invasion of Iraq live on late-night TV while I played Everquest. I was sitting in algebra class when I learned one of the seniors who’d graduated the year before had been shot in the back in Iraq. I spent countless hours sitting on my computer watching the horrific videos coming out of these war zones, of US Humvees getting blown up by IEDs, and US troops being shot by snipers in dusty Iraqi towns. I remember watching the videos that came out of the 2nd battle for Fallujah and just being glued to the screen. War captivated my imagination and held my mind hostage.

I fully expected to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. At the time in 2009 it was unheard of for any infantryman to serve out a full enlistment without being deployed to a war zone. We were so short of manpower that they were putting cooks and supply clerks on combat patrols.

This was the backdrop of my decision. This highlights just how much mental turmoil I was in, that I would willingly sign up to go to war. This shows how much power my trauma held over me. I felt so concerned about the rise of a tyrannical government that I was willing to put my life on the line in order to learn firearms and tactical skills so that I could resist a tyrannical government if it ever came to it. I thought I’d overreacted and misread things. Turns out I’d just been early.

War Lust

War was also exciting for a 21 year old testosterone filled boy. I grew up on war movies. Now at the age of 38 I can look back with hindsight and realize just how much pro-war and pro-military propaganda the US puts out.

Great movie, highly recommended.

I've had my eyes opened since leaving the US. Last month, in Da Nang, I watched Dia Dao, "The Tunnel". This film humanizes the VC in a way no American Vietnam film ever has. American war movies really glorify violence and "the enemy" are all dehumanized and the audience just cheers on the American “heros” as they mow down the inhuman enemy. Enemy combatants get shot and die in spectacular fashion. Throwing up their arms and issuing loud cries of pain. But we’re never shown that these are real people, with real lives, families that love them and miss them, hopes and dreams that are forever broken.

Walking out of that film I felt my worldview shatter. At this time I’d been speaking out vocally against the regime for about a month and my mind was prepped to finally accept all of the horrific actions of the US against black Americans, indigenous Americans, and anyone we deemed an “enemy” all around the world, horrific actions and horrific oppression that I’d willfully ignored(to my great shame). I'd known intellectually that the US wasn't the good guy throughout much of history, but wow it was a whole different experience to feel it viscerally.

It felt like when I left religion in college. I grew up going to the Methodist church and left Christianity at the age of 20. When I left I felt like I’d been lied to my whole life. One of my first memories of America was attending Sunday service. The sermon that day was about Jesus walking on water. I remember walking out of that service and looking around at the adults with incredulity. I asked my adopted mother, “you adults really believe that? You really believe that this man walked on water?”

I remember at Christmas telling my mom “I know there’s no santa.” I remember telling her “I know it’s you putting money under my pillow, there’s no tooth fairy.” I still wonder to this day why we lie so often to children. The lies were very obvious to me as an eight year old child coming from China and being bombarded by these new traditions which I couldn’t help but interpret as just weird, nonsensical lies. And then you throw into the mix a man who walks on water and came back from the dead? Puh-lease!

Random tangent, I receive a LOT of hateful comments and messages online. Almost all of them come from white men who have a bible verse in their profile or some variation of “proud Christian, proud father.” It was my experience growing up in the Bible belt that Christians are hypocritical and two-faced. Not to say there aren’t good Christians. I can confidently say that Christians today who support the trump regime, especially the vocal evangelicals are not good people and they do not follow the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. If anything they embody the traits and characteristics of the devil and the antichrist.

Okay, tangent over. Living in Vietnam and meeting the Vietnamese people, I saw how kind and generous they are, how they’re humans just like you and I and want all the same things; peace, happiness, the ability to live a prosperous and safe life.

This was truly eye opening. A shattering of the imperialistic US zeigeist which I’d been living under for my adult life. It was heartbreaking to see the effects of the war in the country still present 48 years after the war officially ended. I was eating in a local roast goat restaurant when a man crawled in. CRAWLED IN. He was missing both of his legs from mid thigh and his hands were nubs. He had no fingers. I suspect these were birth defects caused by all the toxic agents like Agent Orange that the US dropped onto Vietnam. This man crawled through the restaurant selling lottery tickets.

I thought about just giving him money but realized that he was intentionally not begging. He was selling tickets in order to support himself with dignity. So I bought five lottery tickets. It cost me 50,000 dong($2 USD). I smiled at him and told him thank you. My interaction with him was so much more valuable than the cost of those tickets. He reminded me of the humanity inherent in all of us and the extreme destruction that the US government and war machine has wrought upon the entire globe and continues to wreak to this day.

I don’t regret my service in the Army. I still hold the view that our military is the most equitable and honorable place I’ve ever worked. There are posters everywhere of the core Army values: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage. These aren’t just empty words. The Army truly tries to teach the meaning of these values and instill them into every soldier.

I love the radical accountability in the Army. A platoon leader will get in trouble if one of his soldiers gets a DUI on the weekend even if the soldier was in a completely different state and had no contact with the PL. That soldier was still ultimately the PL’s responsibility and so the PL will also suffer consequences as a result of the soldier messing up.

We could certainly use some radical accountability in our current regime.

We recite the soldier’s creed daily:

I am an American Soldier.

I am a warrior and a member of a team.

I serve the people of the United States and live the Army Values.

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained, and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.

I always maintain my arms, my equipment, and myself.

I am an expert and I am a professional.

I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy, the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.

I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.

I am an American Soldier.

I am lucky that I never deployed overseas and did not have to kill on behalf of this imperialistic government or experience the trauma that so many combat veterans have suffered in our two decades long war on terror. I am lucky that my experience of the Army was largely positive.

I am proud that I took an oath to defend the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. I am proud of my fellow veterans who reaffirm their oaths to defend the constitution, a document that guarantees human rights for all humans regardless of citizenship status on US soil. I am proud of my fellow veterans who intend to uphold their oaths to defend our constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.